The candidate is a postdoctoral fellow at the Rockefeller University in the Laboratory for Investigative Dermatology. Her long-term career goal is to establish an independent laboratory, studying wound healing and skin diseases. The immediate career goal is to extend the work that she has begun on psoriasis and its relationship to wound healing, and further establish herself in the dermatology community in general and in the scientific community at large. Towards this end, research derived from the current proposal will be used to seek further advancement initially as a Research Associate progressing to Assistant Professor over the time frame of this award. The goal of this project is to advance our knowledge of the molecular events that convert a homeostatic epidermis to a physiological hyperproliferative epidermis in wound healing and to a pathological hyperproliferative epidermis in psoriasis. The specific plan is to functionally characterize four novel genes, that the candidate has recently cloned, which are differentially regulated in these skin conditions.